Life

Alright! Starting things back up here with some more interactive poetry. The guidelines remain the same – I am asking you for 3-4 words (random or related it does not matter). With which I will then create a poem with. And if you would like I could give you 3-4 words of my own for you to work with as well. So lets get things started drop a comment with the words you want me to use and we can begin!

Awesome writer over at The Outpourings of My Heart gave me some more words for my interactive poetry which I am late in writing but better late than never! Her words for me were (Whitening, Jokester, Building, Launchpad) heres what I came up with.

Laughter (I couldn’t think of a better title sorry)

Have you seen the building
With the launchpad
Atop its highest ceiling
I wish I had
The chance to see
Those rockets take off
And fly so free
While I cough
At the smoke
That is whitening
The sky and making me choke
It’s almost frightening
This technology
That can take us into space
And the wonders of astrology
We move at such a fast pace
Thank the ones who make us smile
The comedians and jokesters
Without them life would just be a trial
And everyday the end would just get closer

I would say that, to some degree, everybody has issues with trust; With opening themselves to another human being completely. This is because inside, we are all afraid of being hurt, and having that trust we gave out betrayed. I regret to say that I don’t really have a positive spin to what I’m going to write today. This is more for me to rant and get some of this hurt I’m feeling out there. If what I write today helps someone, I’m glad. With all that said, let me dive right into things.

I don’t trust easily. I don’t open myself up to others, because I am afraid of being hurt. But that’s not to say that I’ve never opened myself up to anyone, because I have. I haven’t done it with many people, only two I can think of. Of these two people, one of them is someone who I can say, with as close to being 100% certain as is humanly possible, wouldn’t betray me. But then again, I guess I would have said the same thing about the other person and that didn’t really work out in my favor. I guess there is a reason trust is normally built up over a long period of time, because this other person and I hit things off really quickly, becoming fast friends. This may be because of the close proximity which our majors put us, but whatever it was, we became good friends. There may have been more to it – more to our feelings than just friendship, but that was never outwardly expressed. Just something that may have been under the surface. But I cared about this person, because I care about my friends. Regardless of whether or not I have feelings beyond friendship for them. I care about all of my friends. If I call you a friend that means something to me – I invest a lot of myself into friendships, because that’s just who I am. I will always be there for my friends, no matter what. When they won’t do the same for me – god that hurts. It hurts so fucking much. That’s just a normal friendship, not one where I have opened myself up to someone. Because I guess part of me had an expectation that if I opened myself up to someone, they wouldn’t hurt me. But I guess I was wrong.

“When you care about someone, you can’t just turn that off because you learn they betrayed you.” ― Paula Stokes

I guess she just never cared about me. I feel I should pause for a moment and mention the fact that this person has a significant other. This is why those feelings I mentioned earlier were never expressed. But back to things: I just have a hard time understanding, I guess, how you can let someone open up to you if you don’t care about them, and if you don’t have any intention of sticking around. I think that’s wrong and irresponsible. Trust is a fucking valuable thing. It represents a person’s vulnerability, it represents how much they respect and value you, and it represents their belief in you. Their belief that you would never hurt them. Trust isn’t restricted to romantic relationships, either. That’s not why I’m upset. What upsets me is how they’re behaving towards me now. You see, I noticed how she began to act weird around me come finals time last semester, but I thought it was just the stress of exams. When it continued into the next semester, I went to talk to her. She said she needed space, she said she didn’t really get what was happening last semester, but that she just needed space. Which is fine, I can respect that. And I have. I have given them their space. But there is a difference between wanting space and avoiding someone completely which is what has been happening. They have been avoiding me completely. And god that fucking hurts – they won’t even talk to me anymore. I don’t understand how someone can do that. Because this trust wasn’t one sided, either, they trusted me too. I would never do anything to betray someone’s trust. So how can they just walk away? I don’t get it.

Friendship is delicate as a glass, once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks. -Waqar Ahmed

My example may seem childish to some of you, and I would argue that it isn’t. Because the value of trust doesn’t change, neither with age, nor experience. It changes on an individual basis, and to me, I don’t have anything more valuable to give someone than my trust and my friendship. All I want is my friend back, but that’s not going to happen. I have to come to terms with that. It fucking sucks, but I can’t do anything to change it.

One last quote to end things

A true friend is someone who is there for you when they’d rather be anywhere else. – Len Wein

Another recurring visitor to my interactive poetry for us this week! Great writer from A Teens Insight her words for me were (Disgust, Disappear, Excitement, and Thrill) and heres what I came up with

Shame

Have you ever felt a thrill
Followed closely by disgust
Intense joy that fills
You up like stuffed crust
But what comes after
Will make you rear
Back, listening to their laughter
All you’ll want is to disappear
Because all that excitement
Isn’t worth this feeling
That has left me frightened
I want to begin the healing
But I don’t know
If I’ll ever be rid of their blame
And this constant woe
Because this is the feeling of shame

Josh over at My Friday Blog decided this was the week he would participate in my interactive poetry! His words for me were (Success, Haunting, Slush) and heres what I came up with.

Falling Short

We all dream of success
But not all of us make it
Some of us cave to the stress
Even if we struggle to admit
Our goals are turning to slush
And our life is falling apart
We move around in such a rush
Putting so much stress on our hearts
Every choice is so haunting
And It feels like every decision
Has just left us wanting
The outcomes we had envisioned
We struggle with what we see
Because all we’ve ever done is work
Yet we aren’t what we wanted to be
Every other quality we’ve shirked
Now that stress has taken its toll
And we’ve missed our goals
We wish we’d had more fun
Instead of avoiding the sun

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw

Changing oneself is often one of the hardest things that we as people can undertake, but there comes a time in almost everybody’s life where we have to change or continue living our lives in a way that we don’t want. Recognizing and accepting the need for change is often as hard as the actual process of changing is itself. Therefore, the whole ordeal is not an easy one, but a necessary one, and that’s what we have to accept.

So as I sit here writing this at 19 years of age, you might be wondering what I know of change, and you’d be right to ask because I’ve asked myself that same question many times before. Before I begin, let me try and answer that question. I consider myself a thoughtful person, and as such a reflective person as well. This has led me to think over the things that I have both experienced myself, and seen others experience that have helped to shape me into who I am today. I have seen members of my family destroy themselves because they refused to recognize that they needed to make a change in their lives. I have seen people I care about push me away because they are too afraid to make the change that they readily admit that they need, and all of it hurts. So I want to think that I know about change, and whether or not I do is up to you to decide.

So let me tell you my story.

When we are growing up we never think that anything will ever happen to us. We have a hard time accepting the fact that we aren’t invincible. Where I went wrong was thinking I wasn’t like this. I consciously thought that I didn’t think I was invincible, but I was wrong. At some level I thought I was invincible in my youth and I could do what I want without fear of repercussions. This, as you can imagine led to some pretty poor outcomes. I’ve always been someone who does things to excess – I really don’t know when to stop. If I find something I like I will just continue to do it. For example if I find a new song that I really like, I will basically listen to it repeatedly until I can’t stand it anymore. However, the problem with that example is that unlike with music I don’t always end up stopping whatever it is I’m doing to excess. Another example would be when I get to college I didn’t want to change how I went about studying and participating in class, and that didn’t work. But college was another world entirely and it wasn’t something I was prepared for, honestly.

College for me was a place for me to hide from the things that had always brought me down at home. My social anxiety that had plagued me for most of high school, which essentially made my social life non-existent outside of the school grounds, because I was terrified to ask people to hang out. I realized one day that it wasn’t some outside factor that was holding me back from socializing, rather, it was me holding myself back. Slowly, I overcame that particular challenge. To this day whenever I ask people to hang out, there is a part of me that is still terrified, but now I don’t let that hold me back. College has allowed me to start over and make new friends. These friends were ones I could actually hang out with outside of class because that was pretty much the only opti on. College for me was essentially me looking away from the problems that faced me at home. There, I was introduced to things that I said I would never do, and yet I ended up doing anyways. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I didn’t struggle with doing things to excess. During my freshman year there came a point where it became essentially impossible to hide from the problems at home. As my grandfather was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, things only continued to deteriorate with my own struggles, I now realize looking back.

I entered into my sophomore year (I am currently a sophomore) a few weeks after my grandfather died, and that hit me hard – harder than I even realized. Things got so bad for me that I brought myself to the very edge of ruin. I was basically in a car teetering on the edge of a cliff and if I leaned too far forward that would be the end of me. So when I hit my rock bottom, I knew I needed to change, and I knew I needed to do it fast. I’ve sought help and I’ve started to make the changes that I need to live the kind of life that I want to live.

There is a reason I shared this story with you – and that is because I want you all to understand that you don’t need to come so close to the edge of ruin like I did. I believe that all of us know when we need to change something in our lives and so the problem lies not in us figuring out that we need to change but in recognizing that need. If I had only taken the time to look in the mirror and think for a second I would have known what I had needed to do far sooner and I would have saved a lot of people a lot of hurt and worry. So I want to end this with a challenge and a quote – I want to all of you who know you are flawed and know you need to change to take a step forward the distance does not matter so as long as you are going forward and not backwards.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek – Barack Obama

I want to know more about all you awesome people! I’d like to invite you all to share one or more of your goals with me – big or small! Whatever you want to share – I want to hear.

I’ll go first

I’ll share one of my goals that you all may not know about me. At some point in my life I want to do a TED talk. I don’t know on what yet, but I do know that I want to do one. I feel like I could really do a great TED talk on something if I really set my mind to it! Hope that doesn’t sound conceited! There are so many things I am passionate about and I would just really love to share that passion with everybody else on such an elevated platform. So here’s to hoping!

My second goal I’d like to share with you all is my desire to become a critical care/ER nurse. I am currently a nursing student and the area I want to specialize in is critical care because that’s the area that hits closest to me as I spent a lot of time growing up in the ER with my mother. So to me its my way of both fulfilling my need to help people and giving back to the same people who helped my mother and I.

Those are a couple of my goals and if you’re willing i’d love to hear what drives you and what you hope to accomplish!

A hero is someone who, in spite of weakness, doubt or not always knowing the answers, goes ahead and overcomes anyway. – Christopher Reeve

Doubt – I don’t think there is a single person alive who can honestly say he has never felt it. Whether it’s about if he should go on a date, ask someone out, if a job is right for him, and various other issues. Doubt, like other negative emotions, can drive us to dark places if we let it. The problem is that so many of us have no clue how to best deal with doubt, myself included. So I want to talk about my overall experience with doubt, in the hopes that it may help someone to better manage their own.

Some of you may know that I am a Nursing major, and some of you may even know from firsthand experience what that is like. It’s hard. It is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my entire life in terms of academics. Granted, I came into this program knowing it would be hard, but it’s surpassed all my expectations. Recently I’ve been questioning if this program is right for me. I want to help people – I need to help people no matter what I do for a career. I just know I need to help. That said, nursing is so high stress all the time, I question whether or not I will be able to handle it. I question whether or not I will really enjoy it. I often wonder if all this is because of where my clinical placement is right now, and the tasks to which I am currently assigned. I can’t say for sure at this time because it’s all been wearing me down. I don’t know whether or not I need to switch majors. I don’t know if I stick with nursing and end up hating it, what will I do? Things like this have been eating away at me and for the past couple weeks, it’s been really bad to the point where I’ve become depressed which doesn’t help my grades. It’s just a negative cycle that I’ve kept repeating and repeating. I doubt that this is all right for me and I predispose myself to not liking it, and that only serves to make things worse because I realize I am not giving myself a fair chance.

My friends and family have both talked to me and encouraged me to keep going and to give Nursing a try. They say things like it will get better, and doubts are normal. My doubt makes me question if it ever really will get better. Over this past weekend, I’ve realized that I am only making things worse by letting my doubts wear on me that I will only further dig myself into depression by allowing them to be the focus of my every thought. So I’ve decided to adopt a new attitude, or to at least attempt to. I want to take things as they come, and approach both my major and my life with an open mind. Otherwise, my life will only continue to become more miserable, and I don’t want that. However, a reasonable amount of doubt is healthy because living life with 100% certainty isn’t healthy either. As Voltaire said ““Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”So while I will not ignore the enormity of the unknown, I will do my best to take it one day at a time.

When dealing with loss of any sort, most, if not all of us, experience grief. It’s a terrible feeling and, for some people, coming to terms with grief is a long and arduous process. I’m not going to sit here today and try to tell you how to deal with grief because we all experience grief differently. I just wanted to write about grief and hope that maybe my experiences and my continuing to experience grief will help you recognize those who are grieving.

In the past, I’ve written about how, over the last 3 years, I have experienced deaths in my family. My great grandfather in 2012, my great grandmother in 2013, and my grandfather last year, in 2014. With the deaths of my great grandparents, I don’t think they ever truly sunk in with me. Part of that, I feel, has to deal with the fact that they lived so far away from me, I never had to actually confront the fact that they were gone. However, when my family and I would go south to see my great aunt at the house where she had lived with my great grandparents, it was only when I was there that their absence was truly felt. When I didn’t see my great grandmother’s face and didn’t hear her trying, ever so calmly, to break up my family’s arguments. When my great grandfather didn’t have Fox News on to try and convince my mom and I of the “error” of our ways. It was only then that grief snuck in and started to worm its way into my heart, but we never stayed there for long, so I was able to escape grief’s outstretched clutches, granting me a bit more time before I fell headfirst into its cold miserable embrace.

Given that i’m currently being buried in snow today I thought I would reminisce on when the weather wasn’t terrible. Last summer I started hiking and my friends and I were really big on getting up the mountains in time to see the sunrise, and here are the some of the photos.

This photo is my favorite hands down and it is probably the best picture that I have ever taken. Sadly its also the only photo that really displays the raw beauty of the sun as it paints itself across the landscape.

This is from a different mountain and the sun hadn’t quite come up yet.